♀Françoise Tourault

Françoise Tourault (about 1600 – 1663) was a woman of the parish of Dompierre-sur-Mer, near La Rochelle in the old province of Aunis^W, France, who crossed to New France in the 1640s with her husband, Jacques Archambault, and their children, and was among the early settlers of Ville-Marie, the settlement that grew into Montréal. She was the eleventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Marie Archambault (born 1636).

Early life and marriage

Where she was born is not recorded. An origins index of French emigrants to Québec names her parents as François Tourault and Marthe Noire, of Saint-Amant-de-Boixe in the Angoumois; the index is a compilation, and no register act naming them has been found. Her birth year of about 1600 comes from Tanguay’s genealogical dictionary and agrees with the age of about 63 that a historian’s roster of Montréal gives her in June 1663. She married Jacques Archambault, a farmer and vine-grower of the hamlet of L’Ardillière in Dompierre-sur-Mer, about 1629. No record of the marriage has been found: the Dompierre register that begins in 1629 appears to hold baptisms only. The parish register of Dompierre names her as the mother in the baptism entries of the couple’s children, spelling her name Tourault or Thourault; the entry for her daughter Marie, baptized on 24 February 1636, records that both godparents were of L’Ardillière: neighbors from the hamlet stood sponsor. The entry for her son Denis, baptized on 12 September 1630, names her as “Françoise Tourault”, wife of Jacques Archambault, and places the family “du village de Lardillière de ladicte parroisse”, so the couple were living at L’Ardillière in 1630.

New France

The family left France around 1645–1646 and lived first at Québec, where on 28 September 1648 her daughter Marie was married at the age of twelve. In 1650 they moved to Ville-Marie, then a small fortified post under repeated Iroquois attack, where her husband received land beside the fort. The historian Marcel Trudel^W, in his reconstruction of the population of Montréal as it stood on 30 June 1663, lists her in her husband’s household as from Aunis, about 63 years old, and counts the couple among the married immigrant couples of the settlement. She was buried at Montréal on 9 December 1663, some six months later. An index of French emigrants to Québec records that her widower married again in 1666.

Notes

Her surname appears as Tourault in the Dompierre register and in Tanguay’s dictionary, and as Toureau in a family genealogy published in 1891. A later family compilation, St. Amand Family (1987), gives her a father from Saint-Amand-de-Boixe in the Angoumois on one chart, agreeing with the origins index on the parish, and on another page calls her Françoise Chauveau; that compilation draws on Tanguay, and neither claim comes from a register. The date of her burial comes from Tanguay and the 1891 genealogy, not from the burial entry itself.